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Inmates More Likely to Die in Missouri Jails Than in 42* Other States

The Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics released a bunch of numbers yesterday offering an exhaustive demographic account of inmates who are dying in prisons and jails across the country.

It's not a report that Missouri will necessarily be proud of. The state shared the No. 7 ranking with Utah in the category of mortality rate per jail inmate in 2009, the last year on record. The state's twenty deaths equaled a ratio of 173 deaths per 100,000 inmates, which is the calculating measure used by the Justice Department's Deaths in Custody Reporting Program. *The District of Columbia is also included in the rankings, but six states do not report their annual numbers, so the results might be slightly skewed.

In 2008, Missouri was ranked tenth in that category. In 2007 we were ranked second, behind only Washington, DC.

The State prison system fared better, comparatively. The 81 prisoner deaths in 2009 gave us 266 deaths per 100,000 inmates, or a No. 24 ranking.

Overall, mortality rates are declining among states and prisons across the country, and 2009 witnessed one of the lowest numbers of jail deaths in a decade. In 2008 and 2009, suicide, heart disease, cancer and liver disease remained the leading causes of death in both prisons and jails.

The justice department data also are broken down by the inmates' ages, races, and sex.